American humorist S. J. Perelman was so taken with this movie he wrote about it 40 years later in an essay entitled "And, in the Center Ring, That Stupendous Death-Defying Daredevil..." He said "Alfredo Cordona, the wizard of the flying rings, and his partners doubled for the actors. I saw the picture four times, reacting so volcanically to Cordona's forward triple somersault that I almost rent the chair in front of me to matchwood."
Because the film was produced in Germany, it was not made with the intent to pass the newly established MPPDA's "Hays Code" which had been introduced the year before with hopes of mollifying the more than 100 local and state censorship boards around the United States. These boards quickly took an ax to the film, cutting, on average, enough footage to fill two film reels. New York made the fewest cuts, removing slightly less than one reel of footage.
Credited by acclaimed German director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck for initiating his interest in film, after having seen it at four years old at the New York Museum of Modern Art, thinking he was going to see O Fantástico Dr. Dolittle (1967).
Underwent a 2k digital restoration between 2014 and 2015 by the F.W. Murnau Foundation and the Austrian Film Archive from an edited copy for the USA market belonging to the Library of Congress, with German intertitles and missing scenes taken from a nitrate copy belonging to the Austrian Film Archive, with some scenes also coming from copies belonging to the Munich Film Archive and the New York Museum of Modern Art and lost intertitles recreated with a FWMS indicator in the bottom left corner.
Believed to be the first documented instance of the sport of unicycle hockey.